Grains of Sand

Friday, March 18, 2016

Musah Muhammad lives between the dump and the stagnant lagoon. His is unequivocally the worst bit of land in Sodom and Gomorrah, a freshly reclaimed patch of silt and trash. It would likely be one of the first cleared once the dredging starts, so people keep treating it like an open-air toilet. There is a crust of fat, iridescent blowflies on every single surface.

Musah spent months sleeping out in the open on the dump, under the two diggers abandoned during the last attempt to dredge the lagoon. He was once attacked by packs of rats as he slept, and another time woke up to find himself lying next to corpses that had floated to the surface of the water. Everybody said he’d get killed, but he survived.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Much but not all of what I read this year was work-related. My recommendations are:

Owning the Earth by Andro LinklaterCosmigraphics by Michael BensonThe Vital Question by Nick LaneClade by James BradleyAdventures in Human Being by Gavin FrancisJust Mercy by Bryan StevensonAurora by Kim Stanley RobinsonBraiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererThe Wonderful O by James Thurber

I didn’t see nearly as many films as I would have liked to. Among those I did see that I particularly liked were Timbuktu and Song of the Sea.

I’ve just finished Number 11 by Jonathan Coe, and am reading Rise of The Robots by Martin Ford and After Nature by Jedediah Purdy.

Among the books I hope to read next are Inequality by Anthony Atkinson and Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert.

Image: in July I got to leave my shed and spend a week in another shed. But it was a shed on Eigg with a view of Rùm.

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

...There’s an ethnography of Alaska’s Athabascan peoples, by Richard Nelson, called Make Prayers to the Raven. Its gist is that these “animist” folks don’t revere an abstract Nature, nor do they see it as just a set of resources and logistical problems. They have relations to it, rather like the relations you might have with your partner’s family, or the neighbors, or your co-workers: a bit opaque, touchy, a mix of affection, obligation, and prudence. And these relations are specific—not with Nature, but with the salmon, or a river, or a tree. They are on many scales, again, much like our relations with individuals, institutions, countries, cultures, in our human-on-human lives.

We can’t decide to be Athabascan, of course, but this strikes me as a promising direction for a realistic, open-minded ethical practice. It takes very seriously that we live with the rest of the world, and it can be a big pain in the ass, or even hurt or kill us, but it is also the only possible site and source of all the joys we can have...

...In some respects, Anthropocene thinking is ecological thinking turned up to eleven, with a keen awareness not just of the practical relations among human and natural systems, but also of the values at stake in those.

What I call a democratic Anthropocene is a way of naming the politics that could possibly be up to this situation. It’s about building movements and institutions that move toward an equal voice in shaping the planet. And it’s about building up the capacity to begin engaging in real collective self-constraint...

the nature of desire what can one sensibly add on this most contemplated topic? Samuel Johnson wrote: “the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it.” In Religion of the Future, Roberto Unger writes:

Our insatiability is rooted in our natural constitution. Human desires are indeterminate. They fail to exhibit the targeted and scripted quality of desire among other animals.Even when, as in addiction and obsession, they fix on particular objects, we make those particular objects serve as proxies for longings to which they have loose or arbitrary relation

... It is not only to other people that we are ambivalent; it is also to our own desires because they are ours and not ours. This confusion enters into the experience of insatiability and endows it with its tortured and desperate quality,

A bacterium found on the rear end of a small worm in the deep ocean hints at the origin of complex (eukaryotic) life. A telescope rivalling the great pyramids in size that is soon to be built in Chile will enable its creators to make sharp images of earth-like planets far away in the galaxy. Optogenetics and recently developed imaging techniques have enormous potential to increase understanding of the human brain, the most complex thing in the universe, and the treatment of disease. [1]

My response to that is: good for him. The pre-edited text continued:

We are but embryon philosophers. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swing open and reveal a wild what.[2]

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

A. We looked at whether the music evoked happy/joyful or sad/scary feelings, and got a positive/negative rating. We used music from three films: the melancholy theme from Schindler's List, the scary shower scene from Psycho and the upbeat Cantina scene tune from Star Wars. The Canadians reacted as you might expect. The Mbenzélé...found all the music negative.

Q. Why might the Mbenzélé not like the Western music?

A. All the pygmies' own music is highly arousing and positive. They feel negative emotions disrupt the harmony of the forest and they depend on the forest and so they want it to be happy.

from an interview with Stephen McAdams regarding his research into universals in music.

Mbenzélé music is mostly vocal, McAdams explains, with some clapping and beating on log drums. But is "of a sophistication comparable to Western symphonic music, with extraordinary polyphonies and polyrhythms."

For the Mbenzélé, music is functional. "They don't sit around and consume it. Music accompanies various kinds of activities."

Saturday, February 07, 2015

For rebellious behaviour, slaves are pinned to the ground, and burned by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby their pains are extravagant...For cries of a lesser nature Gelding [castration], or chopping off half of the foot with an Ax...For Negligence, they are whipt by the overseer with Lance-wood Switches, till they be bloody, and several of the Switches broken, being first tied up b the hands in the Mill-Houses...After they are whip'd till they are Raw, some put on their Skins Pepper and Salt to make them smart; at other times their Masters will drop Melted Wax on their skins and use several exquisite tortures.

from an 1698 account by Sir Hans Sloane about practices on sugar plantations in the West Indies, quoted by Andro Linklater in Owning the Earth (2013).

Slaves or sage slaves by Jerry Toner is insightful on the Roman institution of slavery, with only mild teases.

Friday, February 06, 2015

Here are a few additional notes and comments relating to a review of The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time published in The Guardian.

the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion Health warning: cosmologists are not saying it is OK for you to be late. See, e.g., Sean Carroll. See also The Now.

[added 16 February]: Time Reborn there is a fascinating critique of Time Reborn by Joe Boswell herephysicists in the academy groan Smolin is based at the Perimeter Institute outside the academic system. The quality of its people can be gauged in the commitment of its director Neil Turok to, e.g., education in Africa.

deep freedom openDemocracy published an edited extract from Roberto Unger's Religion of the Future here. See also his site and talks.

prophet – or...crank Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer writes "Unger may think of his work as preparation for prophesy, but it ends up as pontification."

It appears there will be some errors in the print version of my review. For example, cosmic inflation is thought to have begun 10-37 seconds after the big bang, not 10-37. Also, I think it is correct to say that Unger and Smolin are only saying that parts of this model are preposterous, not necessarily all of it.

For A New Map of Wonders I have blogged in connection with Unger here and Smolin here.

Fiction: Tenth of December by George Saunders (2013), Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014) and The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1959). I've had a copy of the last of these three on my shelf since 1986 and only got around to reading it this month.

Sunday, November 09, 2014

...The point is no less true for being a bit of a cliche. Indeed, if some accounts are to be believed, standing up for the truth of it may have may have cost Simon Barnes his lucrative and enjoyable career as Chief Sports Writer at The Times, from which he was dismissed in June of this year. According to some accounts, Barnes spoke up one time too many against the illegal killing in England of Hen harriers, a spectacular and beautiful raptor that is all but extinct in that country. As Barnes notes in the book, “only one pair of hen harriers succeeded in breeding in 2012...

I am out there cheering for all the real conservationists...
They are the people who are constantly seen as sentimentalists trying to save nice fluffy animals when in fact, as the great Gerald Durrell said, what we’re actually trying to do is stop the human race committing suicide.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity. But we visit and remember lakes, forests, architecture, cities of wonder, unruly temples, oceans, islands, the ecstasy of nature. We remember nature intimately and forcefully, and we recall lovely or powerful cities with delight at their art. That is why they become the focus of meaning in the afterlife. That is why they are wholly remembered.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Paul Kingsnorth's LRB review of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall is worth a read. For example, Klein's determination to make climate change fit into her pre-existing narrative [1] is well highlighted.

But I take issue with the end of the review, which quotes something Daniel Kahneman said to George Marshall — "there is not much hope" — and appears to take this as conclusive.

I think this falls into the trap of another pre-scripted narrative — that of radical pessimism.

Not only do we not know how things will go; we cannot know how things will go.

What we do know is that we have some freedom of action, albeit with tight constraints.

Sure, the future is likely to be hot, extremely bumpy and crowded, but we should not discount surprise altogether, not least significant technological and/or social changes which reshape the landscape of possibilities.

We should not assume, as Kahneman appears to do here, that climate change can only be tackled by lowering people's standard of living. Indeed, the opposite may be true.

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing" says Michel Houellebecq. He is right on the first point, not so much on the second.

Note [1]: On narratives, see Culture and Climate Change: Narratives edited by Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk and Robert Butler (pdf) for which I organised 11 responses by others to the question, "What kind of story is climate change?" and in which I discussed four stories in the "In Conversation" section (also published here).

Friday, September 05, 2014

This post contains some additional notes and comments to my review of The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf, which is published here.

I suggested the Telegraph use this photograph with the review because it's striking, of course, but also because the archaea growing in the Silex Spring live at the edge. For significance of that, see below.

Here is an attempt at humour that, wisely, did not make the final edit:

One of my favourite books is The Pooh Perplex. One of my least favourite viruses is Herpes Simplex. So I was intrigued when I first heard the title of this book. What on Earth (or beyond it), I wondered, could be The Copernicus Complex?

Copernicus...was wrong. Among the things that he (and indeed Kepler and Newton) did not know is that, far from being fixed, the Sun itself is moving through space at about 200 kilometres per second, completing a rotation of the galactic centre once every 240 million years or so.

... small differences...can turn out to make all the difference.Before the edit the second paragraph continued:

Nature is subtle and “little” things can be clues to much bigger mysteries. And in time even the Kepler's laws of planetary motion (and the laws of motion and gravitation which Isaac Newton developed towards the end of the same century) have proven to be only approximations. An anomaly in the orbit of Mercury supported Einstein's general theory of relativity (1916), which challenged basic assumptions in all physics to date. Further, in the last couple of decades unprecedented computing power has enabled researchers to show that even apparently well-established elliptical paths can actually be far from fixed. In the long run seemingly small perturbations can, and often do, cause planets to careen off course into their host stars or each other or go whizzing off into deep space.

With the recent work of the Kepler spacecraft, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.

I really did enjoy this book but there were moments when I felt it could be shorter with no loss of quality. For example, do we really need another explanation of Bayes's theorem just to be told that it is ill-advised to draw conclusions when you have a sample size of one? Perhaps I have just read too much popular science.

Earthlike planets in the
Goldilocks zone...are a small
minority ...albeit a minority that contains billions!

the cosmo-chaotic principle this idea is the heart of the book, and I would have liked to have got there sooner and read more about it including, for example, an expansion of this:

Several people who are studying the
biological universe have suggested we adopt this way of
conceptualizing life, as a phenomenon hovering on the bring of
disorder. Michael Storrie-Lombardi – life is something that happens
on the edge, wherever that edge appears...life is a collection of
phenomena at the boundary between order and chaos. Across that
interface we can imagine there is something akin to a voltage
difference. Except this biological gradient is multidimensional, an
intersection of available energy, order and disorder, and time.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

I have a review in The Guardian of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and A Rough Ride to the Future by James Lovelock. I wasn't sure it would work to pair these books, but it seems to have turned out OK as far as it goes. Here are a few additional comments and notes.

An interesting piece on Roko's Basilisk. "The combination of messianic ambitions, being convinced of your own infallibility, and a lot of cash never works out well."

Bostrom recently outlined his ideas at the RSA. You can listen to the recording here.

Once we begin to celebrate... this phrase is from Thomas Berry's essay The Ecozoic Era. In the western mystical tradition see also, inter alia, Thomas Traherne. A state of awareness that unites elevated cognition and affect might enable what the writer Tim
Robinson calls the good step -- though he doubts this is durably achievable for humans:
“Can such
contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even
fleetingly worthy of its ground?”

New machines could one day
have almost unlimited impact on humanity and the rest of life See Turing's Cathedral: the Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson (2012).

The argument that a superintelligent system will
shape the world according to its “preferences” preferences is developed in chapters 5 and 6 of Bostrom's book. The argument that most preferences that such an agent could have will...involve the
complete destruction of human life and most plausible human values is developed in chapters 7 and 8.

Lovelock thinks...in the very long term...we should welcome-machine-based consciousness. Sara Imari Walker and Paul Davies speculate that “life forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.”

For a far out scenario for life in the very very very long term see this.

[superintelligence] will
live and experience thousands of times as fast as we
can - here is more from Turing's Cathedral (page 302)

...Organisms that evolve in a digital universe are going to be very
different from us. To us, they will appear to be evolving ever faster,
but to them, our evolution will appear to have been decelerating at
their moment of creation – the way our universe appears to have suddenly
begun to cool after the big bang. Ulam's speculations were correct. Our
time is become the prototime for something else.

judgement on right or wrong. Bostrom writes at the beginning of Superintelligence that it is likely that his book is seriously wrong and
misleading. He adds, however, that alternative views, including the
idea that we can safely ignore the prospect of superintelligence, are
more wrong.

There may (or may not) be mileage in thinking about and comparing to scenarios in which superintelligence arrives from outer space. Stephen Hawking is among those who suggest this would
probably be a catastrophe for humanity, analagous to the slaughter of indigenous Americans by Europeans. In The Beginning of Infinity (Chapter 9) David Deutsch counters that any
civilisation sufficiently advanced to transport itself across
interstellar distances would, necessarily, have no need of the raw
materials, or anything else, in our solar system. Deutsch continues:
“Would we seem like insects to [an advanced alien civilisation]?
This can seem plausible only if one forgets that there can only be
one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea
that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a
belief in the supernatural.”

stupidity The first story in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad is about a machine which its inventor intends to be fantastically intelligent but which turns out to be incorrigibly stupid. And, of course, in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought calculates that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. When the receivers of the
Ultimate Answer demur, Deep Thought replies that "[he] checked it very thoroughly, and that quite
definitely it is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with
you is that you've never actually known what the question was."

Image: natural stone arch near Þingvellir in Iceland, site of an early Parliament. Jacob Bronowski warned "we must not perish by the distance between people and government, between people and power."

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

...At first there weren't any rivers
either, the waters ran deep under the ground. All you could hear of
them was a distant roar, like that of powerful rapids. They formed a
great waterway the shamans called Moto uri u. One day Omama
was working in his garden with his son when the boy started to cry
because he was thirsty. To quench his son's thirst, Omama made
a hole in the ground with a metal bar. When he pulled it out, water
leaped up to the sky. It pushed back his child, who had come to drink
his fill, and shot all the fish, skates and caimans into the sky. The
stream rose so high that another river formed on the sky's back,
where the ghosts of our dead live. Then the waters accumulated on the
earth and ran off in every direction to form the rivers, streams and
lakes of the forest...

7. Smallpox virus -- fate of densely settled communities is hugely influenced by pathogens such as this. The elimination of smallpox a major triumph of medical science.

8. Sugar -- central to a early phase of globalisation, first time large amounts of energy transported from one part of the world to another.

9. Stirling engine (1816). The atmospheric engine developed by the blacksmith Thomas Newcomen (1712) started the "Anthropocene proper." Stirling engine, more efficient, may be part of better way forward.

10. Plant fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process (1913) facilitated massive growth in agricultural productivity and enables a population of more than 7 billion, for now.

11. International peacekeeper (toy). Increasingly globalized economy is vulnerable to instabilities. Climate change likely to be one among several factors behind some conflicts.

12. What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944). "Living things embody process far more intricate than atoms or stars." What is our biotech/synbio future?

13. Odroid -- a "supercomputer" in a 8cm cube. Each of its four CPUs can perform more than 2 billion operations per second. It costs less than 50 Euros.

14. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom (2014). Superhuman machine intelligence could be "the best or the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity."

15. Cone shell -- our future is hugely influenced by the fate of the oceans.

Monday, March 31, 2014

I spent a good part of a day in February with Richard Mabey, and wrote a piece for The Telegraph, which was just published (see note). Here's a passage from Mabey's biography of Flora Thompson that I particularly liked:

The naturalist William Hudson wrote an essay in 1918 about what he called the animism of children. "By animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature," he explained, "but the tendency or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates to animate all things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all visible things. It persists and lives in many of us, I imagine, more than we think, or more than we know, especially those born and bred amid rural surroundings...

Hudson reckons he was about eight years old (much the same age as Flora at her most sensually alert) when the raw intensity of his registration of colour, scent and sound -- "the sparkle of sunlight on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey, the smell of dry or moist soil, or herbs and flowers; the mere feel of a blade of grass" -- began to take on a sense of immanent meaning or significance, as if these objects and phenomena contained some impalpable essence beyond their physical reality. They become talismans and totems, sometimes even slightly magical.

Note:
The Telegraph version omitted the passages in black below:

Mabey, 73, is in vigorous form for a man recently laid low by a virus that was leaving him quickly fatigued, and loving life in Norfolk. He moved here around a dozen years ago after spending most of his life in the Chilterns, and after an episode of a severe depression which he documents the highly acclaimed memoir Nature Cure (2005). The day before I visit he has been up on the great beaches of the North Norfolk coast. It's a vast place that is always changing, he says, and one he has visited many times over the years since student days. Yesterday birds that are usually there at this time of year were, he says, strangely absent. The Brecks (East Anglia's heathland) and the Broads (its magical waterland) are also a short drive away and frequent destinations...

But the non-human world, so far away
from the political nightmares of that time, was never far away for
Mabey. While working as an editor at Penguin, he wrote Food for Free
(1972), a guide for foragers of wild berries, fungi and shoreline
delights. The book was an immediate success and has never been out of
print. “It is my pension fund,” he says with a smile, adding that
foraging is not the sole preserve of hippies. During the Second War,
the government issued an advisory pamphlet while the Vicomte de
Maudit stirred phlegmatic British hearts and stomachs with They Can't
Ration These!

Mabey's second book, The Unofficial
Countryside, helped to define a new, edgier kind of nature writing.
Inspired by Adventure Lit Their Star, Kenneth Alsop's 1949 account of
how the little ringed plover established itself “in the messy
limbo which is neither town nor country (...sand pits, quarries,
reservoirs, sewage farms...on clinker among junked car bodies as well
as natural river shingle),” The Unofficial
Countryside was republished in 2010 with an introduction by Iain
Sinclair, doyenne of British psychogeographers, and is an
important text for anyone thinking about the “rambunctious garden”
or feral future of non-human life under enormous pressure from
humanity...

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

The apparent confusion between the reality of dreams and the reality of waking life... allows writers to use dreams to question reality without having to attempt an impossible imitation of a dreamlike state. In one of his unpublished notebooks, Coleridge famously wrote:

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake—Aye! and what then?

So unanswerable is the question, so neatly does it blend the reality of dreams and the reality of waking life, that H. G. Wells, in order to lend verisimilitude to the nightmarish fantasy of The Time Machine, borrowed Coleridge’s unsettling supposition and concluded his story with just such a flower.

Monday, February 17, 2014

At a talk at the Oxford Martin School titled Artificial intelligence: examining the interface between brain and machine, I asked Anders Sandberg what role, if any, cultural products, including fiction, could usefully play in thinking about the future.* He replied:

I quite like Asimov's robot stories because they are beautiful demonstrations that if you try to get your robots to behave according to a fixed set of rules there are going to be conditions that lead to bizarre or stupid behaviours. There are actually good demonstration of why you shouldn't use that sort of programming. But Asimov came up with the rules mostly to have a good framework for this stories. The real problem is when people think they are proposed seriously.

Any individual story, and individual piece of fiction is not going to work. But I think reading a lot of science fiction is actually quite useful to stretch your mind. None of the individual stories in necessarily useful or helpful but they can help you get into mindsets that are very different. If there is one thing science fiction is about it is about dealing with the other – dealing with very different situations and especially beings that function in a very different way. And I think that flexibility is important when we start to reason about it. Ray Kurzweil suggested that we give future AI the golden rule. That way they would learn how to behave themselves. But anyone who has tried to explain the golden rule to an inquisitive 8 year old will realise there are plenty of loopholes in that. And that's a human 8 year old. If this had been an AI 8 year old the loopholes that are obvious to an intelligent machine would be very weird to us.

I think the money quote in this talk was "We have very little idea how to encode a good values system [into intelligent machines]."

* The video is here. My question is at 1.05.30 and Sandberg's reply at 1.09.15. I mentioned Marvin the Paranoid Android in the preface to my question in reference to his anecdote, at 1.01.00, about a robot he built that got stuck in a pattern of learned helplessness. The transcript above is not exact.

Additional input of heat...equivalent to...four atomic bomb detonations per second See here. As I noted in Minotaur, the additional accumulation of heat in the oceans since the 1870s due to human activity is estimated as equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs.

exact and beautiful adaptations Jacob Bronowski's lovely phrase occurs in the first few pages of The Ascent of Man (1973), about which Simon Critchley recently wrote a rather good piece.

artists aninterview with Maya Lin at Yale360. Tove Jannson had other disasters on her mind in 1946 but this still resonates.

... and new discoveries not just of species, many of which are verging on extinction even as they are discovered (or rediscovered) but also processes in the Earth system itself of which we previously had little or no idea. So, for example, scientists did not anticipate the ozone hole (as is nicely summarised in this piece by Alice Bell). In the event, the international community was able to largely solve this problem. The discovery of ocean acidification -- or at least the likely rapidity of its occurrence and the potential dangers it poses -- came as a surprise to many if not all. Unlike ozone depletion, ocean acidification does not appear to have easy answer. A significant future surprise -- an unknown unknown -- may be relatively easy to solve, as ozone depletion appears to have been, or be wickedly hard, as ocean acidification appears to be.

...but reading The Sixth Extinction is like riding in a well-engineered German car. With apologies to Edward Behr, it could be titled Anything Here Nearly Extinct and Have a Scientist with First Class Communication Skills as a Spokesperson?

It could be that dwelling in geologic time, as you must do to write
about extinction, is good for perspective but bad for action; the arc of
the actual universe is so long it bends toward fatalism. Human time, by
contrast, is good for acting but bad for seeing. It is into the chasm
between these two timescales that species are dropping like flies.

The great difficulty in all of this is
that no one yet knows how the Anthropocene will unfold. Our dominion
over the planet may prove brief in the scope of deep time. Or, the
Anthropocene could transform the entire planet into some new state
that persists for the remainder of the Earth’s existence. Most
wildly, the Anthropocene might surpass the boundaries of Earth
itself, becoming interplanetary if our descendants extend our
geological footprints to other worlds. Knowing that we have our own
age to shape may alter what we do with it, with possible outcomes
lying somewhere between our immortal reign and imminent demise.

But a distinct possibility is a “gone-away world [rather] than birth of
anything new...Radioactive fallout as fingerprint”

a world utterly transformed by synthetic biology one place to start thinking about that is here

Is it too much to ask... I made an assertion here not a question: “It is not absurd
to ask...” ...whether we can express our humanity...with compassion... These words are from the palaeoanthropologist Rick Potts as quoted
by Lee Billings (see link above).

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Prompted by a recommendation here, I am reading The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky. He relates that the Eveny of Siberian used to say that reindeer were created by the sky god
Hövky not only to provide food and transport on earth, but also to lift the human soul up to the sun. There was a ritual each Midsummer day symbolizing the ascent of each person on the back of a winged reindeer. At the highest point the reindeer turned for a while into a crane, a "bird of extreme sacredness"

Recently, a magazine asked me to write a very short piece about the Red-crowned Crane in its Japanese habitat.* Here it is:

Kushiro marsh, on Japan's northernmost island Hokkaido, is a pocket wilderness four times the size the island of Manhattan. Much is bog and reedbed, but beside the river that winds generously through it there are also thickets of black alder and patches of grassland as well as shallow lakes. Damp and mostly cool, with temperatures hovering below zero in mid winter and seldom exceeding 20º C even at the hottest time of year, the air, which is often foggy, is thick with the sounds and smells of more than a thousand species of plants and animals, including the Hokkaido deer and the white-tailed sea eagle. And this is a last stronghold for the Red-crowned Crane. Some 1,000 individuals, out of the global population of fewer than 3,000 wild birds, live here year round.

Every year, tens of thousands of humans flock to watch the birds dance. As in the adumu, the jumping display of the Maasai people, the cranes spring straight up from a standing start and, aided by their light frame and delicate wing movements, rise above the heads of their fellows as effortlessly as if they were bouncing on the Moon. Returning to Earth, they lift an impossibly long black leg in greeting, then curl the neck over so that the head is lower than the body and walk past their partner. Then the male and female promenade slowly, side by side, occasionally throwing back their heads to emit a loud, rattling kar-r-r-o-o-o. It is a mesmerising spectacle. Scientists will tell you that the dances, which take place throughout the year, are both acts of courtship and reaffirmation of a pair bond, which lasts a lifetime. To all outward appearances, however, they are expressions of pure joy.

The Red-crowned – or tancho, which means red top in Japanese – is one of the largest of the world's fifteen species of Crane. Its wingspan can reach two and half metres (eight feet). On the ground, it is as tall as a grown woman. It can live for forty years in the wild – longer than almost any other bird. Individuals in captivity have been known to reach seventy. Its feathers are brilliant snow white for the most part, but solid black on the neck and the wing secondaries. These extraordinary qualities have earned it a special place in Japanese culture as a token of grace, dignity and longevity. A Thousand Cranes, a fifteen metre long painting completed by Tawaraya Sōtatsu in 1611, is a classic of Japanese art. Later in the 17th century, the haiku poet Matsu Basho depicted the bird as a being at one with its watery environment: “The shallows/A crane’s thighs splashed/ In cool waves.” An Origami instruction manual published in 1798 enshrined the folding of a thousand paper cranes as a spiritual and meditative discipline. The tradition sustained eleven year old Sadako Sussaki as she died of leukaemia ten years after having been a mile from ground zero at Hiroshima, and is said to be posed as test of concentration and endurance for trainee Japanese astronauts.

Fondness for the Red-Crowned Crane as a symbol did not always translate into protection in practice. A craze for their feathers in hats brought them to the brink of extinction by the early 20th century. In the 1920s the resident population of Hokkaido island was thought to have fallen as low as twenty individuals. Amazingly, this remnant held on and, following an exceptionally severe winter in 1952, local farmers and residents, including one Yoshitaka Ito, began to feed the birds regularly. Gradually, the population recovered. In the 1960s the species received official protection as a Special Natural Treasure. A large area of Kushiro Marsh was declared a national park in 1987 with the chief aim of protecting them.

Conservation of their habitat and feeding by hand account for the recovery of the Red-crowned Crane in Hokkaido, at least for now. And these factors, together with the fact that there is almost nowhere else for them to go in Japan explain why they do not migrate. The situation is quite different on the neighbouring margin of the Asian continent, where the species once flourished. From wintering sites on the Chinese and Korean coast, the birds migrated to summer grasslands in the interior as far north as what is now Russian territory in flocks that may have once been in the tens of thousands. Today's flocks seldom number more than a few hundred and are dwindling fast.

New efforts at protection in Russia and in China, where the Crane's cultural resonance probably dates back to at least an association with the immortals of Taoist stories more than two thousand years old, may yet turn a corner in the fate of the Red-crowned Crane on the continent. For the moment, however, continuing urban and agriculture development in their favoured habitats, together with a warmer climate, which the birds do not like, as well as other factors such as disease (which could also strike the inbred Japanese population) could yet do them in. For the moment we can still witness in these amazing birds some of the astonishing beauty produced as if by accident in the Earth's evolutionary past that may yet survive into its future.

* The magazine decided not to publish the piece on the grounds that it does not give a sense of what it feels like to be there. If someone wants to send me so that I can actually find out please don't hesitate to get
in touch. ha ha

Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down
animal, with its main sensory organs and “brain” on the bottom,
underground, and its sexual organs on top.

Reveling in manmade spaces...as well as natural wonders. One of the most extraordinary in the book, but not mentioned in my review, is the acoustic signature of the Kukulkan pyramid which, intentionally or not, resembles the falling chirp of the quetzal bird. Cox also recalls a beautiful passage from Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree:

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well
as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan
no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with
itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its
flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such
trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

Can we learn to use sound more creatively and wisely, and can we become better listeners?

Among outstanding creative uses of sound in frequently brilliant show RadioLab is a segment using a choir to depict Mantis shrimp vision. On ultrasound in surgery see this. On the modeling
of molecular structures, namely proteins, see this. Among many other potential uses of sound may be a way to produce hydrogen for fuel. In The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr invites the reader to consider each molecule as
a chord.

While working on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings I blogged on sound a number of times. Among the most striking research I came across suggested that orangutans make wind instruments out of folded vegetation, blowing through it to modulate the sound of their
alarm calls. This makes them the only animal apart from humans known to use tools to manipulate sound. I also wrote about sound at a several points in the book, including in the chapter titled Human:

The Babenzele, a Pygmy tribe in the Congo, combine polyphony (voices singing different melodic lines simultaneously) and polyrhythm (beating more than one rhythm at the same time; for the Babenzele, it may typically be eight, three, nine and twelve beat sections combined in a complex overlapping whole). Many Westerners find this kind of music hard to follow and appreciate. But this initial bewilderment can soon be overcome. A good place to start, says the anthropologist Jerome Lewis, is to listen first to the forest where the Babenzele live. Various animals – monkeys, songbirds and others – make different sounds at different times; combined, these are the sounds of the forest. For the Babenzele, polyphony and polyrhythm are ways of echoing and embodying their world, of learning its secrets. ‘What they are really interested in’, says Lewis, ‘are synergies: technologies of enchantment, where you lose your sense of self and become aware of a greater community.’ When the human voices intertwine just right, he says, a sense of calm euphoria arises, ‘a blissful state in which you have forgotten yourself completely and are lost in the beauty of sound’. [See Note 1]

In the chapter on the Right whale I wrote about the Bearded seals that Cox also describes:

A musician onboard [Max Eastley] used an underwater microphone to listen beneath the waves. He recorded a series of long whistles that started high and descended, very gradually – ever so slowly – right down the scale. The sound was something like a slide-whistle or theremin but richer and sweeter, suspended in a vast, echoing world on whose floor, far below the waves and ice, one could imagine, in the far distance, the rustle and click of crustaceans.

When the sea is in a gentle mood, the play of light on its ever-changing surface can be spellbinding. But sounds heard from beneath the sea are another thing. They make unseen space apparent, rather as raindrops on forest leaves or church bells echoing on a hillside describe landscape for a blind man. On our little boat those whistles shifted the focus of the mind’s eye. No more were we merely bobbing and cutting through obdurate, shifting steel-grey water; we were in a spaceship drifting high above a hidden world

The calls we listened to that day – simple and unchanging in form – were made by a seal. At the time they seemed no less enchanting for that. All things make music with their lives, as John Muir said. Only later did it occur to me that what was really notable about that moment was not presence but absence. Until about three hundred years ago there would have been thousands of whales in these waters, and the call of a seal would have been a small part of the background to their songs and grunts rather than a lone call echoing through emptiness.

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Nietzsche...warned that the emergence of something, whether an
organ, legal institution or a religious ritual is never to be
confused with its acquired purposes. “Anything in existence having
somehow come about is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned
anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.” This is a
liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of
something against its possible applications.

-- from The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal

Image: People of Gog and Magog examining the corpse of dragon by Tousi Salmâni

Never
mind vampires and zombies; for true horror read Command and
Control, Eric Schlosser's rip-roaring account about the many,
near catastrophic accidents with nuclear weapons in the US arsenal
throughout the Cold War. In this terrifying picture of a world locked
into a dance with total death, a worthy companion to The Dead Hand
by David E. Hoffman, Schlosser reminds us that unless we change the
system, the potential for unmitigated disaster remains very real.

Five Billion Years of Solitudeby
Lee Billings is a superb account of the search of extraterrestrial
life and the people on the front line of that search. It is also one
of my top environmental books of the year as, having looked to the
heavens, Billings turns his gaze onto the most extraordinary and
wonderful life we know – the stuff right here on Earth.

For a book on another burning issue of
our times – finance – I am hard pressed to choose between The
Bankers' New Clothes by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig and The
Heretic's Guide to Global Finance by Brett Scott, an “urban
deep ecologist” who went undercover inside the system. Very
different in approach and style, both books are excellent on what's
wrong and what to do about it.

Jim Crace's Harvest, which
narrowly missed out on the Booker prize, was among the best novels of
2103. The dispossession of ordinary people by the enclosure of
common land in late Medieval England was no picnic. Crace paints an
utterly compelling picture, with resonances for Boris Johnson's
world, in which greed is good and captures the essence of the
evolutionary spirit.

Before you write me off as a total
Eyore, let me recommend Falling Upwards by Richard Holmes.
This history of ballooning from its inception in pre-revolutionary
France to an improbable escape from East Germany and beyond is an
entrancing, light-weight desert to follow Holmes's magnificent The Age of
Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror
of Science.

And finally, if
I'm allowed to sneak in a sixth book – and one that was new to me
but not to the world – read The Ongoing Moment, Geoff
Dyer's meditation on photography (first published in 2005 and
reprinted in paperback in 2012). All you need to know is that it is
brilliant.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Hopis are very conscious of the (non-monetary) value of their land, and
have persistently refused to accept compensation for losses of parts of
it. A 1970s Indian Claims Commission award of $5 million (that has grown
with interest to near $50 million today), for the illegal taking of
Hopi lands in the 19th century, has never been accepted, and it
continues to sit in a bank even while many Hopis live below the poverty
line. ‘Never sell your land’ is a key lesson Hopis point to as handed
down from their elders. Even though these particular lands have long
been formally outside Hopi control, some Hopis believe that if they
accept the money, they will have sold their birthright, and the sentient
land of their ancestors will never again look favourably upon them.
Money, Hopis say, can never be relied on in the long run, while the land
will always be there to support us.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

He was
seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat
up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks
heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the
slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful
trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk—and
he thought how these same chickens might return from their destination as
pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that
meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the
job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten
by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with
diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see
them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too
heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens.

from The Great Unwinding by George Packer, reviewed by Thomas Frank, who says “what Packer calls 'the unwinding' was
not an act of nature; it was a work of ideology.”

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Alix Rule, a sociologist, and David Levine, an artist, [created] a website called e-flux where all of the art galleries from round the world put their press releases through it. They put it through a language analyser and they came up with a few observations about what they called international art English. “International art English rebukes ordinary English for its lack of nouns. Visual becomes visuality. Global becomes globality. Potential becomes potentiality. And experience of course becomes experienceability.” Now they describe the kind of metaphysical seasickness you get from reading this sort of text, or it sounds all a bit like inexpertly translated French.

A question facing all of us...Like many who reflect on the prospects for life in the universe, Billings turns back towards Earth with a heightened sense of how marvelous life on this planet is, and how worthy of attention and care. Perhaps this turn needs a name if it doesn't already have one. It is not the opposite of a Copernican turn (in which, discovering the Earth to be just a small planet orbiting a star rather than the centre of the universe we "downgrade" its importance) but a necessary transformation or extension of it.

David Grinspoon writes that we need to search for planetary intelligence, not intelligent life.

David Deutsch stresses that...our ignorance is still infinite. Deutsch also suggests that this means there will never be an end of new frontiers. Paul Gilster has written No scientific era has has succeeded in imagining its successor...We have no analogues in our experience for what advanced [interstellar] cultures might create.

My review originally ended like this:

...Mr Palomar returns from his reverie to the normal run of life only to find that he is as vulnerable to muddle, hesitation, blunders and anguish as ever before. Better, and maybe more attainable than it seems, is the state Thoreau experienced when he wrote “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is...I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

A poet whose name translates from Chinese as Summit-Gate didn't even need words. Taking refuge from the madness and grief of her times in a small house on windy ridge line, she would collect dry leaves every autumn, selecting them for their delightful and evocative shapes, and store them in special boxes on bookshelves in her library. After she had filled all the shelves, Summit-Gate would wait for the first snowfall and then release the leaves, one at a time, to tumble, skid and scratch across the snow before soaring into emptiness.